Capotes
Scandal and uproar: No Saturday piece! Of course, I've backdated this a bit so that it will fit, but the truth is that I didn't write a thing on 14 October. Truth be known, I usually write everything the day before, painstakingly writing in the past tense. I don't know what happened today. I was just busy.
Happily, the movie that I saw yesterday was Infamous, the new Douglas McGrath movie about Truman Capote. The movie that Waited A Year to run in theatres, so as not to compete with Capote. All I'm going to say is that the two movies are brilliantly complementary, each magnificently better than the other in one way and totally lacking in another. The skinny, at least according to me, is that Capote is about writing, while Infamous is about love. Ordinarily, that would make Capote out to be the loser, but, watching it tonight, I had to hold on to it. Infamous is easy where Capote is analytical. And Capote has the best lines. The one about growing up in the same house and walking out different doors, for one. The line - the last line in the movie - about how "you didn't want to." Infamous has nothing to compare with these.
But Infamous is far better sourced, resting on a good book instead of a bad one, and Toby Jones, I must say, made me feel terribly sorry for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Because, jeeze, after I'd seen Infamous, I thought that PsH was me! So broad and strong. Toby Jones made me think that, if I had tried to impersonate Truman Capote, he'd have made me look like a a bear training at somebody's table.
